Guest Blog Written By: Nichole Stewart, OnBase Certified, System/Workflow Admin at Kansas City Life Insurance Co.
In today’s world, a viable insurance company must be able to keep up with incoming applicant requests and handle them systematically. Document Composition can help achieve this on a small or large scale, depending on your needs.
OnBase Document Composition (17) improves outgoing correspondence by leveraging existing data—from OnBase or third-party systems—and automating the generation of Microsoft Word documents.
Here at Kansas City Life Insurance, we primarily utilize Document Composition in our New Business Department. We’ve opted out of the enterprise version, as we only need it to handle standard declination and adverse action letters that are generated during the initial application process. This may seem small scale; however, there are specifications and requirements based on state regulations that we must take into consideration.
Here is a quick overview of our process:
Currently our New Business department receives applications via mail, email, fax, and online upload. These applications are imported into OnBase and reviewed by our underwriters. Once they make their decision to decline, the application is routed through a workflow and the letters are generated and automatically printed.
Document Composition was fairly new to us prior to this, and there was definitely a learning curve. One of the most difficult areas of development was learning the ins and outs of fragments, but once we understood, it worked beautifully.
In order to accommodate our underwriters, we designed our workflow to apply individual paragraphs, based the users form entries in the workflow, for both the decline letter and the adverse action letter. When the user form comes up in workflow for the decline letter, the admins select whether or not to include a refund and how that will be issued. The box checked adds a keyword value to the application, and workflow reads this value, and extracts the related paragraph from a word template into the new composition letter.
As we began to investigate, we realized we needed a Microsoft Word template for the letter itself, and a separate Word document with all the fragments configured to match the keyword values on the application.
Whether or not the applicant lives in Kansas is also a factor. We generate a standard adverse action letter for all states, excluding Kansas. There are no fragments in the standard letter but, the Kansas letter must comply with Kansas requirements and include one of two statements based on lack of medical records and/or the declination based medical information that is supplied by a third party source.
On average, we generate approximately 42 declination and adverse letters weekly. This is quite a bit of manual typing, copying, pasting, and printing. Without a doubt, Document Composition has helped our admins and underwriters move through their daily, repetitive process much more efficiently. They no longer have to create the document manually, search their notes for the appropriate content to place, or worry about formatting it for mailing. If there is a change to the document, they let us know, and we re-configure the letter and or fragments to comply, save the document template from within Word, and it automatically updates in OnBase.
From a corporate standpoint, Document Composition equals less manual work, faster processing, more applications per day and more money. Bottom line: It just works!
Get started yourself! Learn how Kansas City life Insurance Co. used OnBase to increase customer service and empower agents to develop new business.
